BOCA RATON, FL (September 16, 2009) - The Judaica
Sound Archives® (JSA), a cultural heritage preservation project
at Florida Atlantic University’s Boca Raton campus, is using
specially designed software to connect scholars, students and
teachers to its digitized Judaic music collection, which is one of
the world’s largest collections of its type.

The software enabled the JSA at FAU Libraries to create the
JSA-Research Station, which is a search engine and classroom aid
for researchers, teachers and students of Judaic music, history and
culture. Since the research station’s inception, centers in
Israel, Canada, England and the U.S. have signed agreements to use
it.

Cassette and 8-track tapes, 78 rpm
recordings (some produced as early as 1901), LPs and 45 rpm
recordings, and recordings of CDs are among the materials digitized
on the research station. The recordings contain Jewish popular
music, Yiddish theater, comedy, children’s music, classical
music, Israeli and Yiddish folk, and sacred and Sephardic music.
Also included are selections by Jewish performers, composers and
conductors, as well as Jewish art songs and instrumental pieces.
Many of the recordings are copyrighted. None may be downloaded or
copied.

“Many of these recordings are rare or historic,” said
Nathan Tinanoff, JSA’s founder and director. “Never
before has so much Judaic music and voice been so easily accessible
and so beautifully reproduced.”

Tinanoff and
Dr. Maxine Schackman, JSA’s assistant director, demonstrated
the JSA-Research Station to more than 200 people at the annual
Association of Jewish Libraries Convention in Chicago in July. Many
of the participants expressed enthusiasm for the research
station’s wealth of discography information, label and album
cover images, and its tens of thousands of digitized audio
tracks.

The
JSA-Research Station allows FAU to partner with other centers of
Judaic study, facilitating communication between scholars and
providing unprecedented access to historic sound recordings.
“We have one of the largest and most comprehensive
collections of Judaic sound recordings in the world. We want to
collaborate with people who can make use of it,” said
Schackman.

Educators and scholars who have used the JSA-Research Station
credit the project with enhancing the study of Jewish recorded
voice, music and culture.

The JSA-Research Station is “equivalent to visiting the
archives in person,” said Claire Solomon, an assistant
professor at Washington University in St. Louis. Jonathon
Rosenbaum, president of Gratz College in Melrose Park, Pa., said
“this is an endeavor that has no full parallel any place in
the world.”

Using a customized secure browser, the JSA-Research Station
features a database search tool for finding song titles,
performers, genre and language. Discography information for 78 rpm
recordings, scans of record labels for 78 rpm and LPs, and LP album
cover scans, often containing information about the recording can
be viewed while the selection is being played.

Professor Mark Kligman, professor of Jewish Musicology at Hebrew
Union College in New York, is helping the JSA to pioneer the use of
the JSA-Research Station within the classroom setting and
integrating its use with assigned course work and research.

The
JSA began collecting and preserving Judaic audio recordings from
the early 20th century in 2002 and now has more than 100,000 tracks
of music and voice recorded on 78 rpm, LPs, tape and CD formats.
The collection continues to grow annually at a rate of 10,000
donated recordings. “There’s not a day that a carton of
recordings or tapes doesn’t arrive,’’ Schackman
said.

JSA’s website,
www.fau.edu/jsa,
has become the premier site for Judaic music on the internet. It
features more than 60 performers who have given JSA permission to
air their recordings on the internet. Listeners can tune in to more
than 8,500 audio tracks in a searchable, non-downloadable format.
The web site is highly successful and in the last year, had more
than 23,000 visits from 77 countries.

For more information on the Judaica Sound Archives® or
its Research Station, call Nathan Tinanoff at 561-297-2207 or Dr.
Maxine Schackman at 561-297-3765.

-FAU-

Florida Atlantic University
opened its doors in 1964 as the fifth public university in
Florida. Today, the University serves more than 27,000
undergraduate and graduate students on seven campuses
strategically located along 150 miles of Florida's southeastern
coastline. Building on its rich tradition as a teaching
university, with a world-class faculty, FAU hosts ten colleges:
College of Architecture, Urban & Public Affairs,
Dorothy F. Schmidt College of Arts & Letters, the Charles E.
Schmidt College of Biomedical Science, the College of Business,
the College of Education, the College of Engineering
& Computer Science, the Harriet L. Wilkes Honors College, the
Graduate College, the Christine E. Lynn College of Nursing
and theCharles E. Schmidt College of Science.